Sunday, October 27, 2013

"Maybe
to relate to this album you need to have been whacked around by life a
bit," says Lou Reed. "This record won't mean that much to an
eight-year-old, except you can just luxuriate in the sound, it's so
thick and defined and dimensional. But an eight-year-old won't have the
faintest idea what I'm talking about. And I'm not trying to offend
eight-year-olds," he adds, the faintest of smiles flickering across his
impassive features. "Maybe there's a very sophisticated one out there
somewhere."

Where New York railed against the here-and-now
specifics of Manhattan's disintegrating social fabric, Magic And Loss is
Lou Reed raging against the limits of existence, the absolutes of life
and death; it's also a glowing tribute (literally glowing, since the
playing is luminous) to two friends who died recently. One was Doc
Pomus, a songwriter friend from Reed's pre-Velvet Underground days as a
salaried songsmith. The other, "Rita", was "just a friend. Not a
celebrity, put it that way."

New York was socially engaged and
street-real: Magic And Loss is a spiritual document. ‘Power And Glory’,
for instance, trembles with a palpable feeling of revelation: "I was
captured by a larger moment/I was seized by divinity's heart breath —
gorged like a lion of experience... I wanted all of it, not some of it".
The song teems with mystical imagery of metamorphosis, rooted in the
paradoxes of terminal illness ("I saw a great man turn into a little
child") and of radiation therapy ("The same power that burned
Hiroshima/Causing three legged babies and death /Shrunk to the size of a
nickel/To help him regain his breath").

"I came to understand
that the album was about transformation," explains Reed. "Alchemy. The
purpose of alchemy wasn't to transform lead into gold, that was just one
example of the process, to be used later to transform yourself. I call
the album Magic And Loss because that experience can be taken two ways.
That's why the song ‘Power And Glory’ occurs twice, in different forms. A
whole different tempo, a whole different way of looking at the exact
same thing. The way they faced illness and death was very inspirational.
In the end, it was a magical experience. A positive experience.
Positive to have known them, positive to have watched them go through
this. When, to quote myself, 'you loved the life others throw away
nightly'. I thought they were giants."

Magic And Loss says Reed,
is "an extension of the Songs For Drella album which was an extension of
New York —.the idea of a thematically whole album. Right now, I'm not
interested in the idea of twelve or so disparate songs." Each song has a
subtitle, "like a novel, at the head of each chapter, a little phrase
explaining what it is".

The album conducts you methodically
through each stage of terminal illness and bereavement. There's the
morbid, unbidden reveries of ‘Dreamin’ ’, perhaps the most lovely song
on the record, with its braid of wavering guitar-synth and tremulous,
plangent, pure Velvets guitar. ‘Goodbye Mass’ vividly evokes the awkward
discomfort of the funeral service, Reed bemoaning the disparity between
its dour gravity and the feisty, irrepressible good humour of the
dearly departed. "You, you would have made a joke/ Isn't this something
you'd say/ Tommorrow I'm smoke".

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Both of
them made jokes straight the way through," recollects Reed. "It's
unbelievable. I had said there's this great widescreen colour TV I could
get for you, and I'll hook up all the wiring for you. And they said,
Lou, this is not the time for long-term investments. Joking. I think
that's magnificent. I just think some people are giants. You may never
hear of them, but they just have this thing. They're like the sun,
they're just glowing all the time. They stay that way. When they get
hurt, they don't suddenly turn into this other thing. It would be
totally understandable. If I get a flu, I start whining!"

Then
there's ‘Warrior King’, which documents the most confusing and
ostensibly illogical symptom of mourning, a desire for bloody revenge
that can't be slaked because it's intransitive.

"The character
singing is very mad at the elements that have attacked and killed his
friends. But there's no person to aim it at, with terminal illness. It's
like, if you could take a physical, malleable form, I'd take you in an
alley and do this, and this, and this. It's if I could, if I could...
but with death, you can't. So it's that anger that causes the song
afterwards, ‘Harry's Circumcision’, because you can't walk around with
that anger in your heart. It causes these very negative thoughts, which
is what ‘Harry's Circumcision’ is all about, taken to its natural
conclusion (attempted suicide)." According to Lou's theory, you can't
just stay in that mental state, you've got to go beyond that. Which is
what happens on the album.

"The songs are in a particular order
for a purpose, it's supposed to take you to a certain place. And that's a
really positive state. This is not a negative, down album. I'm not the
only person in the world who's experienced loss. Everybody has a brother
or sister or father or friend somewhere that died and that means they
can understand. You just have to have been alive for a little while to
experience it. It's not a mystery. It's real life giving you a real
hello, welcome to the club."

That "certain place" is reached on the
final track, ‘Magic And Loss’, a spectral sleepwalk of mystic jazz-metal
whose lyrics suggest reconciliation. It hints that Reed's even come to
believe in some kind of afterlife: there's a door up ahead, not a wall.

"You
can call it a spiritual awakening, or whatever you like. Things look a
certain way, like you're driving directly into a wall. There's nothing
you can do about it. But no, it's a door. You just didn't see it. And a
door, obviously, can be opened. It depends how you look at things. The
song ‘Magic And Loss’ I find very uplifting It's resolving the whole
album. You don't wanna come to the end of that experience still feeling
splintered. You have to reconcile yourself to it. But hopefully, it's a
reconciliation with a lot of positive aspects to it. It's an inspiring
thing, what I witnessed. I want to be as good as them. These were the
people who were inspiring to me right the way through the last minute.
It's really sad not being able to call Doc Pomus up right to this day,
because he was like the sun. He was just one of those people that you
feel good when you're around them. You could be feeling bad, and you
visit them and they say two words and you feel good. But then, it would
have been even worse not to have known him at all. That's part of the
whole magic and loss deal."

^^^^^^^^^

Lofty speculations
and spiritual quandaries withal, Lou Reed spends the bulk of his time
grappling with the nitty-gritty technicalities of making records. It the
truth be known, he's a bit of a muso. Way back in his decadent days,
Reed could drive Lester Bangs up the wall by discoursing interminably
about how George Benson invented a totally clean, totally pure
amplifier. Even the unendurable din of Metal Machine Music was informed
by audiophile obsessions. The interview has hardly begun before Reed
launches into a diatribe about rock critics' cloth-eared ignorance about
sound.

"It always amazes me — and this not meant to be
offensive — how little you people hear, on a tonal level. I find the
sound on the new album awe-inspiring. There is a radiance to it, an
enormous tonal range. It's like a stereo image. It's very 3D-ish. You
can actually walk around it. It has the sonic depth to match its subject
matter. This time, I've got the tones I haven't quite been able to
before. On the sleeve of New York I wrote about the equipment we used,
and I was trying to let the people know there's a lot going into the
choices that are there. It's not as spontaneous as it seems."

Reed
explains, at considerable length, about the "incalculable hours" he and
co-producer, second guitarist Mike Rathke, spent on research,
refinement, and modification of equipment. He describes how the kind of
tape you use, the pick-ups, even the wood in the guitar can all make a
difference.* It's all very incongruous.

The reality of Lou
Reed-as-technical-boffin jars discordantly with the image of
Lou-Reed-as-icon-of-street- romanticism. In the post-punk scheme,
technique and technology are generally deemed to be enemies of the
gritty authenticity that's allegedly the heart of rock 'n' roll: Lou
Reed and the Velvet Underground, for all the arty input, are generally
taken to represent the epitome of this raw expression. Because they tend
to come from a Litcrit or humanities background, rock critics find the
nuts-and-bolts side of music-making demystifying. But for Lou Reed, it's
where the mystery is painstakingly constructed. It's a sort of science
of magic.

"No one knows that better than me because I know how
much magic disappears when the technical stuff is wrong. At the end of
the whole process, when you listen to your finished CD, you realise that
you've got a cassette from the very beginning that sounds 100 times
better. So what happened? Why is it so cold sounding? There's no
dimension. That guitar hurts my ears. Where's the bass? Why is it muddy?
If you get into the why of it, it's fascinating. And it's a real thrill
if you finally get it to sound right. The only way to learn is to make
records. But most people aren't really interested, they think the magic
is all over there, and the technical stuff is another matter, and if you
have a good producer that's all taken care of. The writing and
performance are one thing, but if the production and technical side
aren't there... and I've got the records to prove it. A lot of my
records, 'till I could get a handle on it, aren't even produced, except
in the sense that I wouldn't let the producers do anything, rather than
let them do it wrong. And the records are completely dry, 'cos I didn't
know how it worked, but I knew they'd fuck it up so I wouldn't let 'em
do anything. It takes a long time to learn, when you're making a record
every couple of years. It's fascinating, but it's like this onion with
all these skins, endless."

^^^^^^^^

Far more congruent
with Lou Reed's received image is the fact that Penguin are soon to
publish Between Thought And Expression, a selection of lyrics that he
felt could stand up on their own without music. It's strange that it
took him so long to get between book covers, considering that back in
1979 he declared "my expectations are very high... to be the greatest
writer that ever lived on God's earth. In other words I'm talking about
Shakespeare, Dostoevsky..."

"That was just me shooting my mouth
off, but it is a real dream. To do something that's not disposable, that
could really hold its own for ever. It sounds kind of glib and
pretentious, to say you want to be up there with Dostoievsky, but I
would. I wanna create art that will live forever, whether it's on record
or on the printed page. That's why I avoid slang, any expression that
will date, like 'dig it' or 'freaked out'."

Despite his aversion
to transient argot, Reed's lyrics exude a great sense of demotic,
everyday speech, rather than the ornately poeticised. The same love of
‘conversational tone’, the faltering rhythm of thoughts taking shape as
they're spoken, informed his interviews with novelist Hubert Selby (Last
Exit To Brooklyn ), and Czechoslovakian playwright turned President,
Vaclav Havel, both of which are included in Between Thought And
Expression.

"I don't like it when the interview's so cleaned up
that both interviewer and subject sound like the same person. I like to
keep the real rhythm of the way the person talks. With Selby, hopefully
from the interview I did with him, you can hear him think. The way he
puts things together I found really fascinating. Hearing a writer think
like that, you can see why he's a great writer."

The most
interesting thing to emerge in the Havel encounter was the Velvet
Underground's indirect effect on history. First there was a Czech
avant-rock band called Plastic People Of The Universe who covered Velvet
Underground songs, and then they got sent to prison, and then the
campaign to get them released evolved into Charter 77, which in turn led
to Czechoslovakia's ‘Velvet Revolution’. That's a coincidence (the
"Velvet" means soft, bloodless) but a beautiful one, and it highlights
the way a band like the Velvet Underground, by symbolising absolute
possibility, can be ‘political’ without being politicised, can change
things without being explicitly consciousness-raising. Most touching of
all for Reed is the fact that the Charter 77 activists recited his
lyrics to themselves as a source of spiritual fortitude.

"I have
the handprinted book of my lyrics, in Czechoslovakian, that Havel gave
me, and it's an astonishing thing. It meant so much to them. Music was a
real expression to them of social change. We walked over this beautiful
bridge in Prague and they told me that a few years ago you wouldn't
have seen a guitarist on that bridge with kids singing. It was
considered dangerous. Where people get together is where ideas are
generated, and that's a problem for totalitarian governments. It's hard
for us to even conceive of living under such constraints."

When he goes about his daily life, or looks in the mirror, does he feel mythic, an icon?

"I
don't even relate to that. It doesn't even cross my mind. What I'm
really interested in is stuff like analogue to digital converter
shoot-outs. I don't even conceive of that other stuff at all. It's like,
they must mean someone else. It doesn't compute with me, simply because
I know how hard I have to work with the limitations that I have, just
to get to where I am."

Nonetheless, Lou Reed is one of those
artists that people of a certain generation tell the time by. Like Neil
Young, Reed is one of the few figures from his era to survive with
credibility intact and muse in working order. But Reed denies feeling
any responsibility to the people who look to him for the next big
statement. "It wouldn't even dawn on me," he shrugs. He also claims to
be oblivious to the legions of copyist who have turned ‘Lou Reed’ into a
genre.

"I always thought of it as a situation where some really
obvious ideas were sitting there, and I happened to be one of the guys
who happened to hit the dirt first. It's like, hey, look at that,
there's a whole continent over there. It seemed really obvious. Then you
start listening to Brecht or Weill, and you realise quite a few people
have been running around there."

BONUS QUOTES FROM THE PULSE MAGAZINE PROTO-VERSION OF THIS PIECE

"I
spend a lot of time researching. You could call it studying. I ask, Why
does digital do that? What's the analog-to-digital conversion process?
Are the filters better now? It goes back to the wood in the guitar,
which pickups to use. Everything I have has been modified, tinkered
with, to make it work for me." Reed and his co-producer, second
guitarist Mike Rathke, spend "incalculable hours" in research and
refinement. "I practically studied with some technical people who really
helped me out. Because there's millions of choices out there and even
if you had a zillion dollars and bought all these to try them, it’d take
forever. So you really need someone knowledgeable and talented to guide
you. Even down to the kind of tape you record on."

Reed takes
similar pains when it comes to selecting compatible musicians,
preferring to work with people he knows personally. He's quick to
demolish the idea that tension heightens creativity, and is particularly
scathing about what he calls "the Lou Reed/John Cale myth" (that the
duo's prickly relationship is the font of their collective genius).
"Things would be 1,000 times better without that tension." When you
recall that he and Cale disagreed about such minutiae as the amount of
time between tracks on Drella, it's easy to believe.

Reed's team
on Magic and Loss is almost the same as for New York: Mike Rathke as
second guitarist, Rob Wasserman on bass, with frequent Tom Waits and
Elvis Costello accomplice Michael Blair replacing Fred Maher on drums.
"We have the interaction of a real band. The music's based on ebb and
flow. A song should give the impression of being a living thing. It's
always going to be assembled; that's how recording works. But our stuff
is about as live as we could get it and still satisfy my requirements
for sound."

According to Rathke, the approach to Magic and Loss
was, with New York, a fusion of vintage and state-of-the-art. "We try to
blend the old with the new. Lou and I spend a lot of time on
pre-production. It goes down to the kind of wood, strings, pick-ups,
wirings, speaker cabinets you use. Neither vintage nor state-of-the-art
does it all. If I was a painter, I'd want the colors to harmonize. And
sounds are like colors in a way; they have to match."

With his
perfectionism ("compromise makes me ill"), it's not surprising that Reed
has only ever produced one other artist, Reuben Blades. "It's too much
work. You'd have to love what they did, to spend that much time with
their material. Plus I want things my way. I could imagine producing one
song, maybe, and only if I got alone with the person. But I couldn't be
brought along to produce a group – that's too many factors I couldn't
control. I want as much control as possible."

^^^^^^^^^

Lou
Reed is legendary for his antipathy to being interviewed. During our
encounter, he had to cadge a couple of soothing cigarettes, even
though he's quit smoking, because, he says, "I get nervous about
interviews." He was even more uptight about being on the other side of
the tape recorder.

"With Hubert Selby, I came in with typed
questions, because I was sure I’d be nervewracked and I didn't want to
forget anything. Same with Havel. The only reason I did it was that
these were people I really wanted to meet, that I really admired, and
here was a chance to meet them and ask them things that I was really
interested in. I'm sure there are a few others I could think of, but
it's just really hard work. I'd much rather go out for a drink with
them. I found with someone like me it was really good to have notes, in
order of asking, so that I didn't glaze out. And later kick myself
'cause I forgot to ask them the most important question. I had loads of
spare batteries, and a microphone that I knew worked."

Friday, October 25, 2013

Brian Eno-David ByrneMy Life in the Bush of GhostsVirgin/EMIUncut, 2006

by Simon Reynolds

On
its original 1981 release, this album was widely dissed for being
“cold-blooded,” “detached”, an eggheads-in-the-soundlab experimental
exercise. Yet Bush of Ghosts drips with emotional intensity, it’s just
that the feelings don't come directly from the record's makers but from
the found voices--Pentecostal preachers, Algerian Muslims--harvested by
the duo from American radio and ethnic field recordings. In another
sense, the whole project is framed by the conflicted emotions--uneasy
fascination, admiring envy--that this material stirred in Byrne &
Eno, at once attracted by the fervour of these true believers yet
incapable (as progressive sorts trapped within modernity’s rationality
and temperance) of accessing that kind of passion themselves.

Chances
are, you’ll feel the same cold rush as Byrne & Eno the first time
they heard the preacher who “stars” on “The Jezebel Spirit. ” The
electrifying conviction of his cadences as he exorcises the slutty
she-devil that’s possessed an unfaithful wife will make your hair stand
on end, even as your liberalism recoils from the patriarchy he’s
restoring (“Jezebel, you have no rights to her, her husband is the head
of the house”). Elsewhere, it’s the mystical rather than moralising
aspect of religion that enthralls Byrne & Eno: “Regiment,” for
instance, entwines the ecstastic ululations of a Lebanese mountain singer
with sinuous bass and arabesques of synth. Throughout Ghosts, the duo
lovingly recontextualise their sources, embedding the voices in a sticky
web of psychedelic rhythm, funky ambience, and some of the most
counter-intuitive and contortionist basslines you’ll ever hear.

Tracks
1 to 5 (the original first side) are great, but 6 to 11 (side two) is a
whole other plane, gliding you through a phantasmagoric sequence of
steadily more untaggable and precedent-less groovescapes. Following
“Moonlight in Glory”-- falter-funk laced with the halting cadences of
Scriptural chants and astral gospel plaints, as incanted by a literally
isolated African-American sect from the Sea Islands off Georgia’s
coast--“The Carrier” shimmers like a portent or future-ghost of The
Unforgettable Fire. But instead of Bono, thankfully that Lebanese dude[tte?]
reappears to kiss the heavens. “A Secret Life” is an itchy microcosm as
gorgeously infolded as Can’s “Quantum Physics,” while “Come With Us”
pretzels bass-gloop and stereo-flickering sorcery into a disorientating
audio-maze. Heading out into a non-specifically Oriental hinterland of
gaseous gong sounds, “Mountain of Needles” sounds like God sighing with
satisfaction at the end of the sixth day. Byrne & Eno, the Creators
of an equally marvelous if somewhat more compact universe of sound,
ought to have felt pretty pleased with themselves too.

It’s a pity that
the immaculate construction that is Ghosts now has an extension tacked
onto it: the inevitable slew of out-takes, most of them sketchy and
substandard, diminishes the sense of conclusion achieved by “Mountain”. A
couple of the bonus tracks work as intriguing footnotes ( the ungodly
exhalations of “Vocal Outtakes”, the needling stellar twinkle of “Solo
Guitar with Tin Foil”) but overall, the effect is a bit like the
Almighty following up the Cosmos with an encore of… Croydon.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

4AD was founded by Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter
Kent in 1979 as an offshoot of the independent label Beggars Banquet and
intended as a spawning group for groups to graduate to the larger label. The
imprint soon became its own entity, with a sensibility rooted in the
adventurous, open-ended spirit and sonics of 1979, but tilted towards the
darker, more existentialist side of post-punk- (Joy Division and the Banshees,
rather than the politically militant Gang of Four end of things).

Crucial to
4AD’s burgeoning mystique was the lush and enigmatic artwork of Vaughan Oliver,
whose role in establishing the label’s identity was as important as Peter
Saville’s at Factory. 4AD’s earliest acts were proto-Goth outfits like Bauhaus,
The Birthday Party, and Rema Rema, but the label really blossomed circa 1983
with a sound you could call, not unkindly, Goth-lite: delicately textured and
gentler on the ear than the harsh ‘n’ hammy horror-show that Goth proper had
degenerated to, oriented more to rapture and reverie than the macabre or
morbid.

4AD will be forever identified with its signature Goth-lite group the
Cocteau Twins, but other key signings of this period include Dead Can Dance,
Xmal Deutschland, and Wolfgang Press.Just as the “4AD sound” was getting perilously close to formula, the
label reinvented itself in the late Eighties, by catching a wave of
arty-but-raw, rootsy-but-weird rock coming out of America: the brilliant New England outfits Throwing Muses and Pixies (and later
its offshoot The Breeders). In the Nineties, the label diversified again,
signing shoegazers Lush and Pale Saints while keeping an eye out for American
talent like Nick Drake-like melancholics the Red House Painters. The label faded
from earshot for much of the Nineties but has recently resurged with critically
acclaimed acts like TV on the Radio, Piano Magic, and living legend Scott
Walker.

MODERN ENGLISH After the Snow1982Many British groups in the early Eighties
struggled to shake off Joy Division’s influence. The cold marble beauty of
their sound and the mature majesty it lent to adolescent despair proved so
compellingly original it practically condemned a generation to non-originality. (Hell, even New Order
had some difficulties carving out a fresh path). Following their Closer-damaged 1981 debut Mesh and Lace, Modern English stepped
boldly into the light with a sound that found the interzone between Joy
Division-style severity and Orchestral Manoevures in the Dark winsomeness.The tom-tom churning drums frequently
infringe Steven Morris trademark patterns and the bass guitar drones melodiously a la
Peter Hook, but the sparkling guitars and soaring synths could be Tears for
Fears or Depeche Mode. The bouncy gloom of a tune like the oh-so ironically
titled “Life in the Gladhouse” is perfect for Goths who want to dance but keep
their deep’n’mysterious cool intact. The sighing chorus “oh me, oh my” verges
on comical but the great rolling beat banishes any reservations. Indeed
throughout it’s the lithe exuberance of the rhythm section (drummer Richard
Brown and bassist Mick Conroy) that makes After
the Snow such awinning slab of
Goth-lite. That, and artful arrangements and mad-catchy tunes, such as MTV
perennial and wedding-song fave “I Melt With You”.

DIF JUZExtractions1985Far from 4AD’s most famous or celebrated band,
instrumental quartet Dif Juz were nonetheless reputedly the Cocteau Twins’
favorite group. Indeed Robin Guthrie produced this, their sole full-length
excursion.Soaked in reverb and echoplex
(the group were huge dub fans but thankfully never stray into the faux-skank
zone), Dif Juz’s dual guitar interplay resembles an out-of-focus Television or
Durutti Column heard from the bottom of a lake. Impressionistic and rhapsodic,
the plangent ripples and frenetic flurries scattered by guitarist brothers Dave
and Alan Curtis dominate the proceedings, but Harold Budd-like piano peeks
through on “Love Insane” (along with an offkey Elizabeth Fraser from the
Cocteaus) while Richie Thomas’ saxophone on tunes like “Crosswinds” recalls the
serene fjord-scapes of ECM artists like Jan Garbarek. Listen expecting shapely
song-structures or clearly signposted melodic pathways, and you’ll be
frustrated. But if you surrender to the be-here-now meander of it all, the
spangled eddies and lustrous whorls of the Dif Juz sound will carry you up and
away.

THIS MORTAL COIL Filigree & Shadow1986With This Mortal Coil, 4AD boss Ivo pioneered a
format since adopted by the likes of U.N.K.L.E.--the non-musician with loads of
ideas surrounded by a floating pool of musicians and guest collaborators who
help realise his vision. In this case, the project largely involved cover
versions of obscure Ivo favorites and is perhaps best understood as a form of
rock criticism and an act of canon-making. In the mid-Eighties, the choices Ivo
made were striking: then largely forgotten post-psychedelic minstrels like Roy
Harper, Big Star’s Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, Tim Buckley, Tom Rapp. While
the first This Mortal Coil album, 1984’s It’ll
End In Tears, features the project’s single most successful
reinterpretation (Liz Fraser’s awesome and damn near original-eclipsing version
of Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”) Filigree
& Shadow has the edge over the debut. Two more Buckley tunes (“I Must
Have Been Blind” and “Morning Glory”) are joined by “Strength of Strings” off
Gene Clark’s solo album No Other and
a version of Pearls Before Swine’s “The Jeweller”.The stand-out remakes aren’t from the
singer-songwriter era, though, but postpunk: a clangorous treatment of Talking
Heads’ “Drugs” and a version of “Alone” even more glacial and gripping than
Colin Newman’s original on his post-Wire solo debut A-Z. Ivo’s overt over-arching concept for This Mortal Coil was a
twin celebration of “the beauty of despair” and the timelessness of song. But
one also suspects a secret semi-conscious motivation: claiming for 4AD the kind
of maverick stature held by Elektra Records in its heyday.

HAROLD BUDD ELIZABETH FRASER ROBIN
GUTHRIE SIMON RAYMONDE

The Moon and the Melodies

1986

No one would claim this is Harold
Budd’s finest half-hour (that would be his Brian Eno Ambient Series
collaboration The Plateaux of Mirror),
nor that it’s the Cocteau Twins’ peak achievement (too many contenders to list).
But it is a captivating cul de sac offthe beaten track of both artists’ trajectories. And an apt pairing,
given their idyllicism and mutual ardour for effects-saturated texture. Cocteau
soundboys Guthrie and Raymonde do a good job of standing in for Eno on “Memory
Gongs”, cloaking Budd’s piano in a mist of reverb to create an effect like the
autumn dawn-mist slowly rising while a watery sun peeks through yellow-hazed
sky. The instrumentals are nice but inevitably the most breathtaking moments
come when Liz Fraser’s voice enters the soundscape. All updrafts, currents,
tides and breakers, “Ooze Out and Away, Onehow” is a mermaid torch song, while
the shatteringly lovely “Eyes Are Mosaics” would be regarded as a Cocteau Twins
classic if it had appeared on one of their “proper” albums.

DEAD CAN DANCEWithin the Realm of a Dying Sun1987
Dead Can Dance’s motto could be “anywhere but here, anywhen but now.”At once somber and ornamental, their music
forges links between Medievalism (Gothic in the original sense of the word,
DCD’s sound often recalls liturgical music designed for the reverberant spaces
of massive cathedrals) and the non-West (you can hear threads of Middle
Eastern, African, and Oriental music in their tapestry of exotica).This Australian duo is also something of a
split personality group. Running a very close second to Liz Fraser, Lisa
Gerrard’s voice is a thing of wonder in both senses of the word: awe is her
primary emotion, awe is what her piercing ululations strike in the listener.
Brendan Perry is closer to the mold of the troubled troubadours that inspired
This Mortal Coil, figures like Tims Rose and Buckley, and above all Scott
Walker. This means that his rather portentous lyrics (song titles like “In The
Wake of Adversity”) sometimes weigh down his undeniably grand and mellifluous
singing. On Within the Realm, the
follow-up to Dead Can Dance’s dark masterpiece Spleen and Ideal, the split personality was splayed across the two
separate sides of the original vinyl album. Side One frontloads Perry’s doomy
ballads and gloomy instrumentals, while the reverse is devoted to Gerrard’s
devotionals, like the dervish-whirling “Cantara”. Her singing is so bliss-rich
that “In the Dawn of the Iconoclast” was sampled for the Ecstasy anthem “Papua
New Guinea” by the Future Sound of London.Later in the group’s career, DCD would cross over to a mass audience of
the sort of people that listen to New Age, Gregorian chants, and Enya.
But Within catches them at the
perfect median point between the crypt and the chill-out zone.

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Lonely Is An Eyesore

1987

A prodigious feat of
self-celebration from a label then at its zenith of eminence, this compilation
of new tracks specially recorded by the 4AD roster came sumptuously packaged in
an over-the-top style last seen with Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. The standard issue came as a lavishly designed cardboard case
with a three-way folding inner sleeve, but there was also a limited edition of
wooden boxes containing deluxe prints. Sonic contents wise, it’s a curate’s
egg, ranging from the slight to the sublime. Colourbox’s “Hot Doggie” isbrash dance-rock decorated with movie
soundbites, loud and trivial,while “Cut
the Tree” is a typical slice of The Wolfgang Press’s brand of failed
pretentiousness. But Dead Can Dance’s two offerings “Frontier” and “TheProtagonist” are bewitching moodscapes,
Cocteau Twins’ radiant “Crushed”is one
of their best songs ever, and“No Motion” is Dif Juz at their most
dynamic,crashing chords scattering
shards of dazzle hither and thither. Best of all is “Fish” by one of the truly
unique groups of the late Eighties, Throwing Muses. David Narcizo’s martial but static drums, the
gyrating rhythm guitar chords of Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, and Leslie
Langston’s sidling bass create a strange
feeling of suspended motion last heard in rock on Led Zep’s “Four Sticks”, as
though you’re stuck on a treadmill or struggling in quicksand. Her voice midway
between a Stevie Nicks croon and a Gaelic pagan ululation, Hersh sings what
appears to be a love song--“I have a man/he follows my hips with his hands… He
follows my lips with his melting eyes”--although with a lyricist as wayward as
Kristin you can never be sure. One of the song’s more opaque verses--“lonely is
as lonely does/lonely is an eyesore/the feeling describes itself”--provides the
compilation’s name.

COCTEAU TWINS

Blue Bell
Knoll

1988

It’s so hard to pick a Cocteau Twins album as the One. Head over Heels is their early classic,
and EPs like Sunburst and Snowblind, The Spangle Maker and Love’s Easy Tears are mid-period highs.
Still, Blue Bell Knoll is their most
flawless record, and also the one that’s the most approachable for virgin
listeners while still retaining the group’s bottomless mystery. You can hear a
smidgeon of Kate Bush on the title track opener, but Fraser soon sheds all
ancestral traces to assert her candidacy as one of the five or six most
original vocalists of the rock era. Likewise the group, having started out as a
sort of soft-core Siouxsie & the Banshees, now mature into a sound without
parallel or peer. Lindsay Buckingham to Liz’s Nicks,
spangle-maker Robin Guthrie drapes his lover in iridescent canopies of
guitarstuff. Fraser’s sculpted gush of liquidized language is almost
entirely indecipherable but always sounds rich in wholly private,
non-verbalisable meaning.Sometimes
these sweet nothings seem like songs for swooning lovers, sometimes they seem
literally like baby-talk, making you imagine an Eskimo mother chirruping to her
newborn. The Cocteaus struggled after this
album:when you’ve made songs as sublime
as “Carolyn Fingers,” ‘Cico Buff” and “Ella Megablast Burls Forever”what do you do for an encore? They made a
mistaken pop-wards move, with Fraser singing first in better enunciated gibberish
and then in distinctly plain English. She said so much more when you couldn’t
understand a word.

PIXIES

Doolittle

1989

Combining
the raw power of The Stooges with a penchant for all-American grotesquerie
reminiscent of David Lynch, Pixies seem like an unlikely match for 4AD . But
they were an arty group. Singer and
main songwriter Black Francis cited the Surrealists as his big crush, and gave
them the nod in Doolittle’s opener
“Debaser”, the lines “Slicing up eyeballs” and “I am
un chien Andalusia” paying homage to the Luis Bunuel film. Given his Charismatic
Pentecostal background, it makes sense that Pixies music would be a valve for
Francis to vent all his repressions in a "stream of unconsciousness"
(as he put it).His lyrics seethed with
images of self-mutilation, incest, sleaze, "broken faces" and bodily
fluids.The title Doolittle, from the children’s books about the doctor who learns to
talk to the animals, suggests the Freudian notion of man as “the sick animal”,
sick precisely because he cannot accept his own bestialism. Songs like the
gorgeously fatalistic “This Monkey’s Gone To Heaven”, “I Bleed” and “Hey”bore witness to Francis’ grim fascination
with the bare necessities and base fatuities that comprise the biological facts
of life: sex, birth, excretion, death. “Hey” grimly notes that “uh” is the
sound people make when they fuck, give birth, take a dump, and concludes “we’re
chained”. Others like the rampant “Tame” and heavy-breathing “Dead” revel in
the nitty-gritty of nookie. Following hard on the heels of the group’s rabid
opening salvo Come On Pilgrim and
ragged classic Surfer Rosa, this
album was Pixies’ peak. After this they veered off into a lighter-and-cuter pop
direction, as if scared by the dark voids they’d glimpsed on Doolittle.

HIS NAME IS ALIVE

Livonia

1990

Where Pixies and Throwing Muses
brought something new to 4AD, His Name Is Alive seem transparently to be that rare
thing: the American 4AD obsessive, purposefully endeavoring to make music to
caress Ivo’s ear-drums.His Name Is
Alive is essentially a solitary obsessive, Warren Defever, who draws on a
fluctuating cast of accomplices to help realise the
noises in his head.Those sounds have a
spidery exquisiteness that couldn’t be further from the late Eighties/early
Nineties Amerindie norm. The vibe of Livonia (which
sounds like a fantastical imaginary land but is named after Defever’s hometown
in Michigan)
is very much the reclusive studio-whiz alone with his sound-warping boxes. If
the effect is sometimes overly precious and forced in its faux-mystery, the
culprit is often singer Karin Oliver, who sometimes entrances like such
shoulda-been-on-4AD ethereal girls as Cranes’ vocalist Alison Shaw and
Shelleyan Orphan’s Caroline Crawley, but often merely grates with her wavery
shrillness. Still, Defever’s menagerie of strange processed noises and aberrant
guitar parts generally keeps things diverting.

ULTRAVIVID SCENE

Joy 1967-1990

1990

Signing New York indie rocker Kurt Ralske was
another example of 4AD stretching beyond its usual parameters. His music as
Ultra Vivid Scene had far more in common with the Sixties-referencing meta-rock
of the Jesus & Mary Chain and Spacemen 3 than with the Cocteaus or Dead Can
Dance. Like the Spacemen especially, Ralske’s songs play clever games with the
language of love, drugs, and religion, equating them as expressions of a human
ache to fill the hole at the heart of being with a holy absolute--the sweetest
girl, the perfect prescription, God’s grace.At its least, it’s like Matthew Sweet with hipper reference points, both
musically (Velvet Underground, Suicide) and philosophically (Barthes,
Bataille). But at its most--“Guilty Pleasure”, “Extra Ordinary”--it’s
reminiscent of Prince in his neo-psychedelic mode.The opening triptych of “It Happens Every
Time”, “Staring At the Sun” and “Three Stars” makes for an irresistible salvo
of swashbuckling psych, while “Special One,” featuring Pixie Kim Deal’s wonderfully
carefree backing vocals, feels as euphoric as mainlining helium.

PALE SAINTS

The Comforts of Madness

1990

Shoegaze was an obvious fit for
4AD--after all, many of these British bands were inspired by the label’s
groups, especially Cocteau Twins and AR Kane.If Lush were 4AD’s shoegaze-as-pop gambit, Pale Saints were the artier
proposition, making music that was dense, at times overwrought, but always
interesting. The name “Pale Saints” fits them to a tee. Ian Masters’ blanched
vocals have a pure-of-spirit, devotional quality, resurrecting that monk-like
quasi-Gregorian chant style introduced by British psychedelic groups like
Tintern Abbey. Riddled with imagery of nature and the elements, songs like
“Language of Flowers” hark back to the Romantic poets Wordsworth, Keats and
Shelley. “Sea of Sound” sounds like the missing link
between Neu!’s “See
Land” and Flying Saucer
Attack’s Distance, conjuring mind eye’s images of a pink-and-gold
cirrus-streaked skyline at dusk. “A Deep Sleep For Steven” is a cavern of a
ballad, its walls daubed with mercury-splash guitar and echoing to the rumble
of drums from some remote interior cavity. And “Little Hammer” is a delightful
neo-psychedelic oddity, the sepia-tinted melancholy of what sounds like a
ghost-town’s out-of-tune piano (but is more likely a hammered dulcimer) offset
by incongruously vivacious percussion.

SCOTT WALKER

The Drift

2006

Ivo first approached his hero
Scott Walker back in the mid-Eighties, asking him to sing on the second This
Mortal Coil album Filigree & Shadow.
Nothing came of it, but perseverance obviously pays off eventually, because
twenty years later 4AD got to release the legendary balladeer’s comeback album The Drift. Walker’s four astonishing solo albums of the
late Sixties showed that he was a kind of cinematographer of sound, using
intricately detailed orchestration, opaque-but-vivid lyrics, and his elegantly
anguished voice to paint the kind of motion pictures that scar your memory and
fill the immediately subsequent days after viewing with a vague feeling of disquiet. With The Drift, the 63 year old Walker clearly aimed to
make a work on a par with the great European modernists of film, directors like Bergman, Pasolini, Resnais. Accordingly the themes are heavy, verging on
ponderous (songs about the gruesome execution by mob of Mussolini and his
lover, about twilight-era Elvis conversing with his dead twin Jesse) while the
execution is challenging for artist and listener alike, involving bizarre
gambits like pounding sides of dead meat for percussion, horns that caw bleakly
like crows, harrowingly atonal string parts, and sundry mis-shapen noises. The
lyrics that issue from Walker’s peerless mouth--“the slimy stars,” “nose holes
caked in black cocaine”--evoke atmospheres of grotesquerie and malaise. From
the “curare!” chorus of “Jolson and Jones” (a reference to a poison that causes
suffocation through muscular paralysis) to the hair-raising demonic
laughter that erupts in “The Escape”, The
Drift makes Radiohead’s Kid A
look like a walk in an extremely sunny park. It is a powerful album but one
that is easier to admire than to love. The
Drift may not get that many repeat plays but, like one of those great
European modernist films, it’s something you’ll want to experience at least
once.

Monday, October 21, 2013

During an interview with Simon Reynolds about Rip It Up and Start Again
in 2006, I played him five songs (without telling him what they were
beforehand) and asked him to talk about each one in turn – along the
same lines as The Wire’s Invisible Jukebox.

This
is one of two songs on what’s perhaps the best side of post-punk ever,
although this is lost today because it’s on CD and not in its original
format of three 45 rpm 12-inch records...
“Careering” is the second of two songs on the third side — side one of
the second record. The first track is “Poptones,” an amazing
trance-like, almost psychedelic song, with a looping, gyrating guitar
riff and this incredible Jah Wobble bassline. Rotten is singing from the
point of view of being abducted and you can’t work out if he’s been
murdered or not, or if he’s just lying in the woods, cowering in the
foliage, with all his body heat going. And the next track is
“Careering,” which has no guitar in it; instead, Keith Levene uses a
synthesizer in a really abstract way and the sounds swoop over your
head. The song is obliquely about Northern Ireland, at a time when the
conflict must have been at its worst and there were people on hunger
strike. Lydon talks about people going over the border, bringing weapons
and bombs. It’s very oblique but it’s definitely about civil strife in
Northern Ireland. It’s Public Image at the peak of their inventiveness. Metal Box is PiL’s masterpiece and this is their best side; this two-song sequence is a real killer.

This
was originally the B-side of “The 'Sweetest Girl',” which is when Scritti
Politti reinvented themselves as a pop band. “The 'Sweetest Girl'” is —
as its title suggests — a very “sweet,” almost cloying pop-reggae song.
It’s a beautiful love song, but the sort of love song that actually
questions the idea of love songs and problematizes notions of love and
possession. And then, on the other side, “Lions After Slumber” is a very
strange track. It’s a list song — a list song through the lens of
Green’s narcissism. It’s a list of things to do with him: “my languor,”
“my greed,” “my elbow,” “my indecision,” “my sex,” “my white chocolate”
and so on, all these states of mind, bodily dispositions, little
moments, fragments of time, things he owns, his stance. It’s obviously
very influenced by post-structuralism and the idea of the self not as a
unitary entity, but as a plurality or as a multiplicity, and the idea of
there being no essence to someone — just these moments and interactions
with things or with people. Despite the fact that it’s about the
fragmented self, coming through it all is this very strong, almost
feline narcissism. The way Green sings it, you feel he’s like a cat
basking in himself, arching his back, really in love with himself. It
comes through in this sort of falsetto he sings in. So there’s an
interesting tension there between the fragmented self and this absolute
self-love conveyed by the vocals. It ties in with the band’s failing
really: Scritti Politti ultimately wanted to be a pop group but none of
their songs ever really got beyond Green’s psyche. I imagine people
bought Scritti’s records and found meanings in them for themselves but
it’s all so tied up with Green and his particular anguishes and doubts.

This is an interesting song. It was a single in England but it wasn’t a
hit. It followed “Once in a Lifetime,” which was a big hit in the UK
but not in America. “Houses in Motion” was sequenced on Remain in Light
to follow “Once in a Lifetime,” which is about someone who’s suddenly
estranged from his routine, his life, his possessions, his family, his
wife. He’s estranged from it and it all seems absurd, yet that
realization hits him with this sort of a cosmic force. It’s almost like a
blinding, mystical epiphany: the idea that you cruise through
everything without connecting with reality. And then, immediately, it
goes into “Houses in Motion,” which is back inside alienation. It’s
based in the same musical ideas as “Once in a Lifetime” but whereas
“Once in a Lifetime” is a kind of mystical, oceanic funk, “House in
Motion” is a sort of eerie, neurotic funk. The protagonist in the song
is back inside neurosis. The key line is: “He’s digging his own grave.”
He’s trapped in routine, going round and round, just working for these
goals and missing life. So it’s almost as if the two songs are sister
songs. In the first one, the guy sees through everything and grasps the
oneness of existence, in an almost mystical way. In the second song he’s
like a prisoner. He’s blinkered. He’s working for ambition and goals,
digging his own grave, going nowhere.

Durutti
Column are interesting because, a lot of the time, people think of
post-punk as this sort of angular, abrasive music but a lot of lovely,
ethereal music was made during that period. I would think of Cocteau
Twins as a post-punk group in some ways and Young Marble Giants, for
instance, made very pretty, intricate, atmospheric, low-key music.And
Durutti Column are a case in point. There’s this intricate, spider web
filigree of guitar-playing that’s almost too exquisite at times. I
almost feel it’s vulgar how exquisite it is — all these arpeggios. It’s
very delicate. There’s nothing abrasive about it. It’s a dream music, a
music of reverie, of drift, of fleeting prismatic perceptions. Vini
Reilly was a very delicate figure. He was anorexic. He was almost
wasting away and so there’s a sense in which you almost feel that the
music is an expression of his body, of his fleeting, weak grip on the world. It’s almost as if he’s going to drift away, like his music.

The Pop Group started out as quite Romantic. They were into the Beat
poets and their lyrics were very abstract and imagistic. They were
political but in the sense of “impossible politics”: they were into the
Situationists, whose famous slogan was “Be Reasonable: Demand the
Impossible.” It was that very Romantic idea of politics. Everything was
politics, mysticism, poetry; it was all indivisible. Somewhere along the
line, though, they got more didactic, a lot more like protest singers,
and “We Are All Prostitutes” is the turning point. It’s still a very
exciting song today. The music is a burning punk-funk sound. The lyrics
are guilt-wracked. It captures a certain aspect of post-punk: the idea
that everything’s corrupt and we’re part of a system where everything we
do is connected to something evil. The Pop Group agonized over the fact
that they were signed to Radar, which was part of a bigger label owned
by a conglomerate involved in arms-dealing. That tortured them and they
left and formed their own indie label. So that was all part of it — the
feeling of being unclean and wanting to be pure. “We Are All
Prostitutes” was an almost hysterical rant about consumerism and
capitalism as a barbaric religion. It imagines the future when our
children will be ashamed of us, stone us, disown us and feel that we’re
totally corrupt. It turned a lot of people off, fans who liked the early
Romantic, Byronic stuff. The Pop Group were a bit like the Romantic
poets, like Blake, Shelley and Byron who were also political. Shelley
and Byron were involved in liberation struggles. Byron was involved in
the attempt to free Greece from Turkish rule. The Pop Group were into
all those guys. But they lost a bit of their Romanticism and became very
guilt-haunted. They were flagellating themselves, so guilty and
tortured by living in this corrupt Western society. People found that a
very black-and-white view of the world, very blinkered and a big turn
off. The album For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? was
very lecturing. The lyrics were almost like pamphlets given out by some
left-winger outside the Tube station. It was very guilt-tripping and
they lost a lot of their support but “We Are All Prostitutes” is still a
powerful piece of music. In some ways, it’s more focused than their
early stuff because their early Romantic phase is quite chaotic
musically. But as they got more militant, they actually got more focused
and hard-hitting sonically.

Friday, October 11, 2013

ONE NATION UNDER A MOOG(article to accompany Synth Britannia BBC 4 documentary)director's cut, The Guardian, October 9th 2009

by Simon Reynolds

The synthpop era really kicked off in June 1979 when Tubeway Army's "Are
Friends Electric" hit Number One.Soon the charts were teeming with thin white dudes caked in Max Factor
28 panstick and playing one-finger melodies on Korg keyboards.The sound and visuals owed a substantial debt
to David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and his stranded alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth.Chuck in some Europe Between the Wars atmospherics and you had the
recipe for Visage's "Fade To Grey" and "The Damned Don't
Cry", Japan's "Nightporter" and "Ghosts,"Ultravox's"Vienna", and the rest of the scene known (confusingly) as
both Futurists and New Romantics. Bowie himself resurfaced with thesynth sadness of "Ashes To Ashes".
And bringing up the rear were the pioneers , the chaps who'd coined the whole
Mittel Europa/ MenschMaschine shtick in the first place:
Kraftwerk, #1 in February 1982 with their 1978 tune "The Model".

Synthesizers in popular music actually go back much further than
the mandroid melancholy of Gary Numan. All
the way back to the psychedelic Sixties, when American groups like Silver
Apples and The United States of America ditched guitars for oscillators. In
1969 George Harrison put out a whole album of Moog doodles called Electronic Sound.German cosmic rockers Tangerine Dream gradually
streamlined their Pink Floyd-wannabe grandeur into a minimal, darkly pulsing, all-electronic
sound.Floyd themselves forayed into
full-blown synth-rockwith Dark Side of the Moon's "On The
Run", whose brain-searing wibbles anticipating acid house, while other
proggers like ELP's Keith Emerson and Yes's Rick Wakeman performed behind
massive banks of electronic keyboardsbut tended to use their synths as glorified
organs, hamming it up with Bach-style variations and arpeggiated folderol.

Far more unearthly electro-tones could be
heard on the telly vias.f. series like Doctor Who and The Tomorrow People or at the cinema courtesy of dystopian movies
like A Clockwork Orange, The Andromeda Strain, and Logan's Run.Black music too had its complement of visionaries besotted with the synth's cornucopia
of otherworldly tone-colours,from fusioneersWeather Report and Herbie Hancock to
funkateers Stevie Wonder and Funkadelic.

Black or white, these precocious knob-twiddlers all had a
freakadelic, proggy mindset: they dug synths for the "far out, man"
noises they generated, so they let rip long
noodling solos or oozed out abstract dronescapes.None stood a chance of troubling the hit parade.

In some ways the crucial word in synthpop isn't "synth" but
"pop". The British groups who took over the charts at the dawn of the
Eighties were catchy and concise. Here they followed the lead of Kraftwerk, who
were not only the first group to make a whole conceptual package/weltanschauung out of the Electronic Age,
but were sublime tunesmiths. It's righteous that Kraftwerk's long-awaited
remastered catalogue is getting reissued at almost the exact same time as the
long-awaited remastered catalogue of the Beatles, because Hutter & Co rival
the Fab Four for both their transformative impact on pop and their melodic
genius.

Equally inspiring to the synthpop artists was Kraftwerk's

formality:their grey suits and short
hair stood out at a time of jeans and beards
and straggly locks, heralding an European future for pop, a decisive break with
America and rock'n'roll.

Perhaps even
more of a portent here was Giorgio Moroder's Eurodisco,whose clockwork-precise sequencers and icily
erotic electronics forged the connection between synthesisers and the
dancefloor,as opposed to the early
association of Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze type music with getting stoned and
supine on your sofa.Released in 1977, Donna
Summer'sMoroder-produced "I Feel
Love" and Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" divided pop time in
two as profoundly as "Anarchy in the UK". The Eighties begin there.

Conveniently, these singles arrived at a time when synths got
vastly more affordable, portable, and user-friendly. As Synth Britannia reveals, what once cost as much as a small house
(and therefore stayed the preserve of prog superstars) became something you
could buy for a few hundred quid,or
cheaper still if you mail-ordered a build-your-own-synth kit and were prepared to
spend weeks assembling the bugger. Groups who'd been inspired by punk's
confrontational rhetoric and sartorial provocations but who found the actual
sonic substance of punk rock to be too ye olde rock'n'rollseized on the cheapo synth as the real coming
of do-it-yourself.

Synthpop went through two distinct phases. The first
was all about dehumanisation chic. That didn't mean the music was emotionless
(the standard accusation of the synthphobic rocker) but that the emotions were bleak:
isolation, urban anomie, feeling cold and hollow inside,paranoia.On the postpunk underground that meant Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing
Gristle, both of whom ironically used a fair bit of guitar but heavily treated
it with electronic effects.On the pop
overground it meant John Foxx and Gary Numan.Gaz also used guitar prominently on his early hits under the name
Tubeway Army. The secret of his success was that his music, for all its
majestic canopies of glacial synth,rocked. Even when he dropped the guitar along with the name Tubeway Army
and went fully electronic on "Cars", he kept his flesh-and-blood
drummer.

The second phase of synthpop reacted against the
first. Electronic sounds now suggested jaunty optimism and the gregariousness of
the dancefloor,they evoked a bright, clean
future just round the corner rather than J.G. Ballard's desolate Seventies
cityscapes.And the subject matter for
songs mostly reverted to traditional pop territory: love and romance, escapism
and aspiration. The prime movers behind synthpop's
rehumanisation were appropriately enough The Human League (just check their
song titles: "Open Your Heart", "Love Action", "These
Are The Things That Dreams Are Made Of").

Soft Cell were also crucial with their songs of torrid passion and seedy
glamour. Their line-up--male-diva Mark Almond, keyboard wiz David Ball--set the
template for the first half of the Eighties. The new compact synths resembled
an orchestra in a box; you didn't need to have a whole band of
instrumentalists. Suddenly pop was packed with duos who divided labor neatly between the
composer/technology-operator and the singer/lyricist: Eurythmics, Yazoo, Tears
For Fears, Blancmange,Pet Shop Boys.
The shape of a synthpop outfit was subversive, or at least enough to make
rockistsuneasy: the rock band'sgang-like structure replaced by same-sex
"couples" plus the occasional female diva/male boffin partnership.

Yazoo were a classic example of this fire-and-ice
combo: Alison Moyet's proto-Josh Stone soulfulnessmatched with Vince Clarke's pristine
perkiness. Clarke had been the brains behind Depeche Mode, or so everybody
thought. Yet while he went on to commit a spree of cultural crimes under
aliases like The Assembly and Erasure, it was Depeche who unexpectedly grew
into Major Artists, leaving behind dinky ditties like "Just Can't Get
Enough" for the musically sophisticated,politically engaged/enraged Construction
Time Againand Some Great Reward.The anti-monetarist
smash " Everything Counts" caught the melancholy of that moment after
the re-election of Thatcher, while "Master and Servant" combined an S/M-inspired
personal-is-political allegory about power (“it’s a lot like life,” so “forget
all about equality”) with a pop translation of Einsturzende Neubauten/Test
Dept-style metal-bashing. Best of all
was the haunting “Blasphemous Rumours,” a jibe at the Almighty which suggested “God’s got a sick sense of humor.”

One running theme in Synth
Britannia, voiced repeatedly by Daniel Miller, the founder of Depeche's
record label Mute, is the notion of
electronic music being essentially un-British. But that would seem to beg the
question of why the UK became the world's leading nation for synthpop, and
later the major force in electronic
dance music all through the Nineties.The truth is that the real kingdom of synthphobia was the United
States.But this also meant that
American misfits could express their deviance by spurning standard high school
fare like Motley Crue for "faggy" English electropop.Depeche's cult following in the States expanded
as they turned out to be surprisingly kick-asslive performers on the arena circuit,peaking with a 1988 show at the Pasadena Rose Bowl that drew seventy
thousand. They were bigger still in Europe, almost Beatles-level in Germany
where to this day there are Depeche raves that play Mode music all night long.

A curious thing that comes through watching Synth Britannia is how the futuristic-ness of this music is largely
irrecoverable to us, precisely because we live in the future that the synthpop
era helped to bring about. Electronic tonalties are omnipresent to the point of
banality, thanks to Nineties techno-rave and Noughties R&B,videogames and ring-tones."Electro" in the early Eighties
meant cutting-edge, the future-now; nowadays "electro" refers to the
kind of sounds that lit up hipster bars in Hoxton all through this past decade
and then unexpectedly went mainstream this year with La Roux and Lady GaGa,
which is to say synthetic pop that isn't
state-of-art, doesn't use the full
capacity of the latest digital technology,and is therefore almost as quaint as if it were made using a
harpsichord.

With the future-shock
aspect depleted, what comes through now is the pop in synthpop: OMD's pretty tunes, the aching plaintiveness
of Numan and Human League.Oddly, what's
made this music last are the same things that made The Beatles and Motown immortal:melody and emotion.